Office Delve for Office 365 admins

The more you and your colleagues use Office 365 to work together, by viewing, editing and sharing each other's documents, the more useful Delve will be for all of you. Learn more about how you as an admin can help users get the most out of Delve.

Delve is powered by the Office Graph and shows users the most relevant content based on who they work with and what they’re working on. The information in Delve is tailored to each user. Delve doesn't change permissions and users will only see what they already have access to.

As an admin, you can make sure that you allow your organization to access the Office Graph, and that you have set up other Office 365 services that Delve uses, for instance SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. You can also help people get started with Delve, and address questions that users might have.

Regardless of which of these Office 365 plans you have, you need to activate the SharePoint Online service and assign users a SharePoint Online license before they can start using Delve. You also have to set up Exchange Online if you want attachments to show up on users' Home pages in Delve. If you set up Skype for Business Online, users can start Skype for Business Online conversations directly from Delve. And if you set up Yammer Enterprise, users can engage in Yammer conversations about documents directly from Delve.

Delve is designed to work with the current or immediately previous version of Internet Explorer or Firefox, or the latest version of Chrome or Safari. For more information, see Office 365 system requirements.

Get new Delve features quicker

If you want to receive new functionality in Delve before it’s made available in standard releases, you can opt in to the Targeted release program. You’ll receive new feature updates a minimum of two weeks before customers in the Standard release program. To learn more, see Office 365 release options.

To enable targeted release for all users in your organization, choose Targeted release for everyone. To enable targeted release for some users in your organization, choose Targeted release for selected users.

Tip: It takes some time to build personalized Delve views for users in your organization. If you opt in to the targeted release program just before the start of a weekend, it’s more likely that people have a good Delve experience at the start of the next work week.

Control access to the Office Graph

You control access to the Office Graph from the SharePoint admin center.

If you don't allow access to the Office Graph, you disable the functionality in Office 365 that is powered by the Office Graph, such as Delve. If you disable access to Delve, you also affect the relevance of the content displayed elsewhere in Office 365, for example in SharePoint Home and the Discover view in OneDrive for Business. See What is the effect of allowing or not allowing access to the Office Graph? for more information.

When users go to Delve, for example by typing delve.office.com in a browser, they're automatically redirected to the geographic region where your organization's Office 365 tenant is located. After the redirect, a three letter prefix indicating the region is added to the URL, for example https://nam.delve.office.com for North America, or https://eur.delve.office.com for Europe.

Help users troubleshoot Delve

Use the information in this section to help troubleshoot issues in Delve.

Users don't see Delve in the Office 365 app launcher

There are a few things you should check if one or more users in your organization don’t see Delve in the app launcher. All these things need to be in place for your organization before people can start using Delve.

Go to Settings > Office Graph and make sure that you’ve selected Allow access to the Office Graph.

Note: If you have a SharePoint Online standalone service (SharePoint Online Plan 1 or SharePoint Online Plan 2) you'll see the Office Graph setting in the SharePoint admin center. However, users won't be able to use Delve or see Delve in the app launcher, because Delve is not available for standalone services yet.

Users see incorrect colleagues in Delve

If the Windows Azure Active Directory has outdated information or if hasn’t been synced with the SharePoint Online user profiles, Delve may not show the most relevant colleagues.

Delve uses information from user profiles in Office 365 to determine who users in your organization work with most closely. These profiles contain information from the Windows Azure Active Directory and from SharePoint Online user profiles. Every 24 hours, people information from the Windows Azure Active Directory is automatically added to SharePoint Online user profiles.

Solution(s)

Check and clean up your Windows Azure Active Directory, and wait for the information to sync to SharePoint Online user profiles.

If you're an academic organization, the sync between the Windows Azure Active Directory and user profiles is not automatic. Your users will need to log in to SharePoint Online at least once to create user profiles.

If you have an on-premises Active Directory and if you've set up Active Directory synchronization, make sure it's synced correctly with the Windows Azure Active Directory.

Users don’t see user pictures in Delve

The user pictures in Delve are from the SharePoint Online user profiles. If there's no picture for a user in his or her SharePoint Online user profile, Delve has no picture to show.

Solution(s)

Make sure that users upload their user profile picture to SharePoint Online. For more information, point users to View and edit your profile.

Users see documents from other users who have turned off Documents in Delve

Users can turn off Documents in Delve which means that they won't see any documents in Delve, and their activities and relationships in Office 365 won’t be included in the Office Graph.

However, if other users still have access to documents from a user who has turned off Documents, they can still see those documents in Delve, just as they can search for them in SharePoint Online.

Other information that's available to everyone in the organization will also be visible even if a user has turned off Documents, such as information from the Azure Active Directory.

Solution(s)

No action needed.

Users see very little or no content in Delve

The content in Delve comes from different content sources across Office 365 such as Exchange Online, Office 365 Video, SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

If users don't have any recently modified or viewed content in these content sources, and they don't have access to other users' content, Delve may have very little or no content to show. Users also need to have licenses to Office 365 services and access to the Office Graph to see content in Delve.

Check the permission settings on the SharePoint Online sites and site collections to make sure that the user has access to the correct sites and their content.

Check that the user is in the Active Directory and that he or she is a member of the correct Active Directory groups. To verify, go to Office 365 admin center > Users > Active Users.

Make sure that the user allows Delve to show documents. To verify, have the user go to Office 365 > Delve > Feature settings and make sure that Documents in Delve isn’t turned off.

Make sure that you’ve assigned users a license to access to the Office 365 services that you’ve activated.

Users can't find a specific item in Delve

Delve doesn't change any permissions and users will only see what they already have access to. Not all content types will appear in Delve, and it can take up to 24 hours for new documents to show up. Also, Delve prioritizes content that's been modified or viewed in the last three months.

Make sure that the content type is supported. Currently, in Standard Release, Delve shows PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and videos that have been uploaded to Office 365 Video.

Check when the document was added to Office 365. It can take up to 24 hours for new documents to show up in Delve.

Users are concerned that private or sensitive documents are available inDelve

Any document that a user can view or edit in Office 365, can also appear in Delve. Delve doesn’t change any permissions and users will only see documents they already have access to. Sometimes, though, you may want to prevent a document from appearing in Delve.

Solution(s)

Check the permission settings for the documents, sites and libraries and make sure that only the intended users have access to the content.

If you want to prevent specific documents from appearing in Delve, follow the steps in Hide documents from Delve. You can keep storing the documents in Office 365, and people can still find them through search – they just won’t show up in Delve.

About the Office Graph

Delve is powered by the Office Graph. The Office Graph stores data representations about all Office 365 items as nodes in a graph index. The Office Graph data is stored in the customer’s partition of the SharePoint Online and Exchange Online environments, and has the same data protection and security as other customer data stored in the same cloud services. The Office Graph data and metadata are stored in the same data center region as the services the data was collected from.

The Office Graph uses rich relationships to describe connections between items of different types. In addition, the Office Graph uses advanced analytics and machine learning techniques to create inferred rich relationships – what we call insights.

To present the most relevant content in different contexts, for example in Delve, the Office Graph uses a two-step analysis. First, it calculates which users in the Office Graph are most relevant to the current context. Second, it retrieves the most relevant content associated with these users. The content is tailored to each user, and users only see what they already have access to.

For developers, the Office Graph insights and rich relationships are exposed through the Microsoft Graph, a single REST API endpoint (https://graph.microsoft.com) that exposes multiple APIs from Microsoft cloud services. For more information, see Microsoft Graph.

What is the effect of allowing or not allowing access to the Office Graph?

What information users in your organization see in Delve depends on the release program your organization is in, and on whether or not you allow access to the Office Graph.

Standard release program

If you allow access to the Office Graph, users in your organization will have Delve in the Office 365 app launcher and they can use all the functionality in Delve. Clicking on a person in Delve will open that person’s page. The person page contains user profile information such as contact information and org chart details, and also documents relating to the person.

If you don't allow access to the Office Graph, Delve will be removed from the Office 365 app launcher. When users visit a person’s page, for example by clicking on a person in OneDrive for Business, that person’s page will contain only user profile information. No documents will be shown. Users can still search for other people, but not for documents or boards.

Targeted release program

If you opt in to the Targeted release program and allow access to the Office Graph, users in your organization will have earlier access to new Delve functionality. For an overview of the differences in what users see in Delve between targeted release and standard release, see My Office Delve looks different from what you describe .

If you don’t allow access to the Office Graph, Delve will be removed from the Office 365 app launcher. When users visit a person’s page in Delve, no documents will be shown.